Picture yourself walking into a wooded path in inky darkness and suddenly seeing the understory aglow in 20,000 glass balls of color-changing light.

Each tennis-ball-sized crystal sits on the tip of a glass stem, looking a bit like miniature glassy hydrangea blooms.

Fiber optic light strands inside each ball pulsate as they fold from one color to the next, almost as if the things are living and breathing alien colonies.

It's a staggering, ground-breaking creation that's actually just one of eight new light-in-the-garden displays that opened over the weekend at Longwood Gardens in Chester County.

It'll run only through Sept. 29 and then be dismantled.

The light show is the first of its kind in the U.S. and is the work of an innovative British artist named Bruce Munro.

Munro is a modest, bespectacled, 50-ish fellow and admitted daydreamer who fell in love with all things light as a child.

"I was always inspired by light, by sunbeams, by Christmas decorations," he says. "I daydreamed a lot as a child, and when you daydream, lots of wonderful things come into your mind. I've learned to encapsulate those ideas."

Longwood's staff -- always on the lookout for super-wow ideas on a scale that no one else attempts -- ran into a Munro field of lights 2 years ago at The Eden Project in Cornwall, England.

Redman invited Munro to have a look at Longwood and see if anything came to mind.

"They said to me, 'Bruce, what would you like to do?'" Munro recalls. "Can you imagine that? I was like a kid in a sweet shop."

After 2 years of planning and 2 months of intricate, painstaking installation, Longwood has a summer attraction that rivals its iconic lighted fountain shows and surpasses even past wonders such as its mansion-calibre tree-house project and its living-willow mazes.

As you might assume, this show is best seen after dark. To accommodate that, Longwood is staying open until 11 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays until Sept. 1.

The only one of the eight displays best seen in daylight is the "Waterlilies" exhibit on the Large Lake near the Italian Water Garden.

This one features 65,000 recycled CDs secured to 6- and 8-foot foam discs floating on the water. The idea is to pay homage to Longwood's famed waterlily platters that grow in its conservatory courtyard.

The CDs literally sparkle in sunlight.

The aforementioned "Forest of Light" display with its 20,000 glowing orbs and 86 miles of fiber optic cable seemed to be getting the most raves.

But a close second is the "Field of Light" exhibit, also comprised of glowing glass spheres, except set in a tree-backdropped meadow on the opposite bank of a lake.

The 7,000 frosted, color-changing glass balls give a different effect as they reflect in the water and mimic the look of a wildflower meadow.

These seem to be more "planted" than "installed."

Look close and the electric supply lines snake across the ground like surface roots. They and the lines in the "Forest of Light" display purposely weren't hidden for that very reason.

Another totally different exhibit is "Water Towers," which are 69 lighted structures that look like barrels spread out across an open field.

The towers are actually seven-layer stacks of 1-liter, water-filled bottles -- 17,388 in all. These also glow and change color to music.

One other outdoor display called "Arrow Spring" is a 300-foot-long serpentine bed of lights that look like little water sprinklers. They're interspersed in a mass planting of blue salvia.

Two exhibits are inside Longwood's 4.5-acre conservatory.

One is a series of six huge chandeliers, each made out of 127 hand-blown glass spheres about the size of softballs. Dubbed "Snowballs," the chandeliers hang from the conservatory's glass ceiling and change color in unison.

The other conservatory exhibit is "Light Shower," and it consists of sheets of teardrop-shaped crystals hanging from the ceiling atop a flooded marble floor.

Practical-minded sorts might look at all of this and wonder, "Man, this must be sucking up a ton of electricity."

Actually, most everything is LED, low-voltage and surprisingly light on the power grid.

All 7,000 lights in the "Field of Light" exhibit, for example, use only about the same wattage as a microwave oven.

"This will let people see (Longwood) in a way they've never seen it before," says Redman. "The most amazing, ground-breaking thing is that we've actually created a new garden type -- a garden of illumination."

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